Trees of My Life

by Angela Townsend

The trees read each other with a generous eye.

The maple was the real author, as anyone could see. Strong and seasoned, her storm memoirs made the best-seller list. She turned cayenne in October, a refined lady blushing graciously at all the acclaim. I made fairy gardens at her trunk and whispered secrets into the little holes where small creatures delivered her Times.

But the maple made room for the willows, shaggy twins blundering into her parlor with guitars and rainbows. Fifty feet and an alternate dimension away, they practiced spoken-word slams for the salamanders, washing their long hair in “the brook,” as we called the backyard trickle. They sat me on their knees and taught me protest songs, and all the toads trusted them.

When the storms came, the brook boiled, and the willows wailed, metalhead locks fighting the night. I worried about the willows, but they were always standing when the sun rose.

My Dad worried about the willows exactly once. The caterpillars came like an Exodus plague, little black ropes tying down our friends like helpless Gullivers. We plucked them off, wriggly work. At eight, I sensed the gravity of our task, painstaking as we fought to save our friends.

The caterpillars called in wasps, and Dad’s hazel eyes vanished under swollen lids that scared the neighbors. But we won, and the brook sparkled. The maple beamed with pride.

The front yard trees weren’t poets, and they knew little of backyard verse. But they wrote charters and invocations, taking their welcome work seriously.

The crabapple apologized for her name, more princess than curmudgeon. When my Mom bedecked her with Easter eggs or Christmas balls, the blue jays swore like longshoremen. The crabapple reassured me they were complimenting her.

A gentle princess, she never judged the pine trees, not even when they were so wispy that I tripped over them in the dark. A line of scented soldiers, they squeezed each other’s hands and presented me with cones the size of cherries, prettier than any figurine.

Time turned the pines to towers, overprotective of the house, squires against the sun. This was just when we moved, and I moved between them like a spirit, feeling their whiskers one last time.

Trees called to me through college, but my ears were stuffed with essays. It took one so brave as the Northern Magnolia to puncture me with poetry again, her indulgent blossoms rhyming our names as we processed into the Phi Beta Kappa induction. I had scarcely seen her in four years, but trees and poets forgive.

She knew she was sending me to Princeton, where Northern Magnolias and dogwoods run April like a bakeshop. Pink sprinkles laugh down every shoulder, and the holy and the pastel sing Psalms across the seminary. A boy I should have dated tucked magnolia petals behind my ears in the chapel and said, “God’s beauty is for you.”

But if the trees have always been with me and for me, the forests of Pennsylvania vanished in a devilish mirage. The man who’d brought me there proclaimed, without end, that the trees were his. His was the forest, his was November, his was every red leaf.

I believed, so desperate to grow into him that I raked up my roots, closed my eyes, and told myself I could love a prairie. When we went to the park, I kept my eyes down, letting him commune with his people, letting myself believe I had no people.

But cayenne leaves and cherry cones kept falling, and old poetry kept calling.

The Bradford pears at work told jokes to lift my spirits, their vulgar scent snickering and squirreling me away, back in the friendship of trees. There was a lone Bradford in front of our window, and it nodded in solidarity.

The Northern Magnolia at the condo entrance threw sprinkles and lifelines, and when everything fell apart, I promised her I would stay. We would speak at length at last.

Trees and poets forgive, and they are inspired by nothing so much as resurrection. Maples and magnolias, dogwoods and Bradfords, shy pines, and eccentric sycamores are taking me in, breathing me out like pure oxygen.

The trees are reading me with a generous eye.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Her work has appeared in The Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Dappled Things, Fathom Magazine, and Young Ravens Literary Review, among others. Angie loves life dearly.